Global and cosmopolitan since the late nineteenth century, anglophone South Asian women's writing has flourished in many genres and locations, encompassing diverse works linked by issues of language, geography, history, culture, gender, and literary tradition. Whether writing in the homeland or in the diaspora, authors offer representations of social struggle and inequality while articulating possibilities for resistance. In this volume experienced instructors attend to the style and aesthetics of the texts as well as provide necessary background for students. Essays address historical and political contexts, including colonialism, partition, migration, ecological concerns, and evolving gender roles, and consider both traditional and contemporary genres such as graphic novels, chick lit, and Instapoetry. Presenting ideas for courses in Asian studies, women's studies, postcolonial literature, and world literature, this book asks broadly what it means to study anglophone South Asian women's writing in the United States, in Asia, and around the world.

This book is the first comparative analysis of a new generation of diasporic Anglophone South Asian women novelists including Kiran Desai, Tahmima Anam, Monica Ali, Kamila Shamsie and Jhumpa Lahiri from a feminist perspective. It charts the significant changes these writers have produced in postcolonial and contemporary women’s fiction since the late 1990s. Paying careful attention to the authors’ distinct subcontinental backgrounds of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka – as well as India - this study destabilises the central place given to fiction focused on India. It broadens the customary focus on diasporic writers’ metropolitan contexts, illuminates how these transnational, female-authored literary texts challenge national assumptions and considers the ways in which this new configuration of transnational, feminist writers produces a postcolonial feminist discourse, which differs from Anglo-American feminism.

Evidence that the most notable fiction writers of the contemporary South very well may be women writers

Many of America’s foremost, and most beloved, authors are also southern and female: Mary Chesnut, Kate Chopin, Ellen Glasgow, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, Harper Lee, Maya Angelou, Anne Tyler, Alice Walker, and Lee Smith, to name several. Designating a writer as “southern” if her work reflects the region’s grip on her life, Carolyn Perry and Mary Louise Weaks have produced an invaluable guide to the richly diverse and enduring tradition of southern women’s literature. Their comprehensive history—the first of its kind in a relatively young field—extends from the pioneer woman to the career woman, embracing black and white, poor and privileged, urban and Appalachian perspectives and experiences. The History of Southern Women’s Literature allows readers both to explore individual authors and to follow the developing arc of various genres across time. Conduct books and slave narratives; Civil War diaries and letters; the antebellum, postbellum, and modern novel; autobiography and memoirs; poetry; magazine and newspaper writing—these and more receive close attention. Over seventy contributors are represented here, and their essays discuss a wealth of women’s issues from four centuries: race, urbanization, and feminism; the myth of southern womanhood; preset images and assigned social roles—from the belle to the mammy—and real life behind the facade of meeting others’ expectations; poverty and the labor movement; responses to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the influence of Gone with the Wind. The history of southern women’s literature tells, ultimately, the story of the search for freedom within an “insidious tradition,” to quote Ellen Glasgow. This teeming volume validates the deep contributions and pleasures of an impressive body of writing and marks a major achievement in women’s and literary studies.

A Southern Weave of Women is one of the first sustained treatments of the generation women writers who came of age in the post-World War II South as well as one of the first to situate southern literature fully within a multicultural context

Discusses the lives of major southern women authors and presents an example of the work of each.

Stories by Southern women. In Tina McElroy Ansa's Sarah, two girls pretend they are their parents making love, while Lee Smith's Tongues of Fire is a portrait of local manners, as when the narrator explains her mother's incessant chatter to fill a void in a conversation, "This was another of Mama's rules: A lady never lets a silence fall."

South Asian diasporas can be considered transcultural legacies of colonialism, while constituting transcultural forms of postcolonial reality in today’s globalised world. The main focus of investigation here is South Asian women’s fiction, where diverse forms of identity negotiation undertaken by the protagonists in a number of contemporary novels (from the 1990s to the early 2000s) are read as transgressions. The themes of early gendered experiences of South Asian indentured labour migration, female genealogies and transmissions of cultural heritages down female lines, as well as negotiations of patriarchal violence, are read using a framework culled from postcolonial and feminist criticism. The literary representations of South Asian diasporic female experience in these texts are forms of commentary and critique by contemporary South Asian diasporic women writers. Hence these novels can be viewed as feminist strategies of textual creativity with distinct political aims of presenting transformative narratives addressing the tensions of diaspora and patriarchy. This book is intended to contribute to the current spectrum of academic work being done in diaspora studies, in that it brings together the concepts of diaspora, transculturality, contemporary women’s writing and transnational feminist critical approaches to bear on South Asian women’s diasporic literature. Contrary to the celebratory notion of the concept in much theory, transculturality, as represented in these texts, is fraught with ambivalence.

   The rich popular tradition of India's women writers is finally available in this collection of short stories translated from seven of the country's languages. The writers and their heroines reflect the complex mosaic of Indian life-they are old and young, rural and urban, rich and poor. Here we meet Muniyakka, called "walkie-talkie" because she mutters to herself; Shakun, the dollmaker, an exploited artist who needs to feel that others depend on her; and Jashoda, professional mother to children of the rich, from Mahasveta Devi's acknowledged masterpiece "The Wet Nurse." These stories "are dense with thsoe customs, manners, and objects that usually remain locked within regional languages," wrote Anita Desai in the New York Review ofBooks . Meena Alexander's thoughtful introduction places the stories and the writers in the context of modern India.

Many women in cultures throughout the world exhibit resilience and power in the face of obstacles and vicissitudes. From colonial New Spain to postcolonial Africa and India, Women and Contemporary World Literature examines ways in which women in literature function within their specific culture and circumstances to confront the challenges they encounter. In spite of fragmentation in their lives - much like quiltmakers - they piece together the scraps of their existence to form an integrated and complete whole. With its focus on power, fragmentation, and metaphor, and a strong interdisciplinary approach, this book offers a unique perspective to scholars, teachers, and students of comparative literature, contemporary world literature, colonial and postcolonial literature, women's studies, interdisciplinary studies, and literature and cultural studies.